Saturday, November 26, 2011

Eve Mentality: Mine

     I've always liked games.  Not sure why.  I don't like all games, but many different genres.  Games like Civilization, Doom, Age of Empires, flying games like F16 or X-Wing vs Tie Fighter and lots of different MMOs, from pretty much the Asheron's Call/Everquest on up.  Also played MUDs and MOOs before all the graphical gadgetry came along.  Games along the styles of those.

     I'm not a particularly angry person.  Loud, can be abrasive, can be angry, but only if poked with a stick.  I'm also competitive, but mostly just to see what I can do, and then try to improve on it next time.  Like in real life, I'm not going to try to win at the expense of some other player.  I know what it's like to be ganked or griefed, and didn't like it, so I don't do it to others.  In a game world, I know I don't have the time or energy or energy to be the best, the top, or have the most, of anything.  I play because some aspects of the game combine to make it an enjoyable experience for me.  I can grind if I have to.  I can focus on grinding in a sweet spot for XP, or for a special drop, or for rep.  I can deal with the tedium if I focus on the short term goal.  When things start to be a grind, I switch from one focus to another, and then start at the first focus point again.  In other games, I can also help keep things fresh by playing multiple races, or multiple classes of characters.  The different playing styles of different MMO toons, or different races in strategy games is an enjoyable change.   If I have to do that switch too often, or too quickly, or too many times, I start to lose interest in the game.  It isn't "fun" anymore.

     Eve is a different beast.  Once your cybernetics are maxxed out, you are learning as fast as you can.  I tweaked the attribute points to lean towards ships and most modules, but I probably would have been just fine had I left them pretty much stock too.  So, the "XP" part is going as fast as it can provided I keep the training que full.  Evemon helps there.  I don't get my jollies by ganking other players, but I will and do engage in PVP, like every other game I play.  I will also grind PVP if I have to in order to get a specific rep or item.  Again, neither of those aspects really apply unless I want bad enough rep with everyone else that I gain rep with the pirate outfits for their reward items.  I want to try just about every aspect of Eve game play, just to see what it is like to play that way (except for the griefer mentality).  With Eve, I don't need to hop between a tank, or mage, or healer or hunter - I can train it all with a single toon and then just hop between ships or clones.  I guess it ends up being the same ADHD style of play but seems easier than having to log in and out all the time - I just dock up and grab a new ship.

     I don't know what a general interest classifies me as.  I really don't give a shit about the background and lore of a game, just the game mechanics and actual playing.  I'm not much for customizing a toons look - I generally pick default, default, default, etc.  I want to pay the game, not play fashion designer.  In Eve though, I tried, unsuccessfully I think, to sort of make my main toon look like me.  It's funny, because other people often make their toon look like them too, but much more flattering perhaps than mine is.  Guys seem to make their female characters look like their wives, daughters or girlfriends - I am no different.  I will learn background or storyline ONLY if it is necessary or helpful to be able to investigate a new or different area of game play.  I am notorious for not reading quest or mission dialogues - don't care about the story.  More than once, that has caused problems, and I have had to go back and actually read the text, but I don't really learn from the few times there's been glitches - I just don't care about the story.  Break it down to the fundamental and salient points, and tell me who I need to blow away, and where they are.  In Eve, I rarely read the text on the left side of the mission window.  I focus on graphics, short sentences and links on the right side.  Sometimes I even have to reread the mission task once I get to the site to remember what I have to shoot or pick up.  Part of this is no doubt that I have multiple Eve clients open, but also, even "critical" details are just boring.  I must be more of a graphical kind of guy.

     So, I don't know what kind of a player this makes me, but I was curious to try the Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology.  Very impressive name, no?  Even if I flunk it, I still might be able to put it on a resume and say that I at least took it.  Apparently, it has been around for about 10 years, and the basic idea for about 5 years before that.  So I took it, not knowing how I would fit into the Killer/Socializer/Achiever/Explorer categories.  In my mind, the socializing would likely be dead last, explorer likely 2nd last, with probably achiever first and probably a bigger percentage than killer, which would be 2nd.

     I've done similar tests on other topics, and as my mind sort of works on patterns, it's not too hard to start seeing themes and "tracks" in the themes for each set or type of questions.  It's easy at that point to steer the test based on recognizing the theme of the different questions.  I try to ignore the patterns, focus on the question, and answer them like that one single question, is the only question I will be asked, ever.  that tends to help me avoid consciously or unconsciously skewing the test results . . . hopefully . . . usually . . . I think.  Anyway, I didn't really like about half the questions because for at least a third of them, neither of the 2 answer choices provided would have been my selection, based on the question.  It asks me if I would pick black or white, but I would never pick either of those - I would pick blue.  I guess it needs to do this to come up with the 4 different categories, but overall, I don't think the test is anything more than picking the best of two bad choices.  Much like politics . . .

     In the end, I scored a profile of Achiever 67%, Explorer 60%, Killer 47% and Socializer 27%.  I would have switched explorer and killer scores myself, but at least both the other two are in the right spot.

The Point?  Nosce te ipsum.  Also, chicks dig Latin ;)

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